Jewelry
by heffermonkey
Summary: A short ficlet written for a prompt at LJ. Teresa/Broken Necklace.


It took Jane all of a minute to figure something was wrong. Lisbon was shuffling around various items of the office, getting the rest of the team nervous. 'Straightening' had been mentioned by all of them with a nervous tension that something serious had been said to get the boss lady sorting her desk.

Jane noticed something different though, an action the others had missed. It wasn't as if Lisbon was really tidying her desk, not in her usual stressed out, OCD kind of way. Every now and then she'd brush her fingers along her neck, give a nervous itch, pause and think, shoot off to another area of her small office.

"She's lost her necklace," he said aloud, trying to relieve the tension of the others.

"What?" Rigsby looked confused a moment, dragging his eyes away from Lisbon to look over at Jane questioningly.

"She keeps grabbing at her neck, I knew there was something different about her this morning. She isn't wearing her necklace."

Van Pelt stared at Lisbon and picked up on the nervous action of Lisbon's fingers at her neck, like maybe the necklace would suddenly appear back in it's place. "She loves that cross, she never seems to take it off."

"Her not wearing her necklace made you think there was something different about her?" Cho questioned Jane. As often was the case, he silently tried to figure out just how Jane's mind worked.

"Yeah," Jane nodded. "Just didn't pick up on it."

He shook his head, he should have picked up on it. Lisbon had been a bit off, nervy, too impatient for morning hello's and chit chat over coffee's with everyone else.

"I hope she finds it," Van Pelt said, turning and sitting down at her desk, happy to know they weren't in for a tongue lashing over something that probably wasn't their fault in the first place.

"She will, just not on the floor." Jane said, "She probably noticed it was missing when she got dressed this morning. Turned her apartment upside down looking for it, couldn't find it there or in the car and figured perhaps it broke and fell off in the office sometime yesterday."

"If it fell off why wouldn't she find it where she's looking? It's gotta be around the desk or on the floor maybe," Rigsby figured.

"Because someones already cleaned up in there before she came in today," Jane pointed out.

"Cleaning staff," Cho added.

Jane gave a smile and headed for Lisbon's office. Tapping on the door he didn't wait for permission before he swung the door open. Lisbon had slid her chair back, eyes scouring the floor again. She looked up at him quickly and tried to look calm.

"Lost something?" Jane asked, eyes scanning the room.

Lisbon put a hand to her neck and gave a rub again. She knew it was stupid to be so upset about the necklace, but without it she felt unlike herself. She missed the light press against her neck when she was trying to relax, or even nervously toying and tugging at it when she was trying to think. When she wrote up reports more often than not she'd pause and contemplate, rubbing the small pendant in her fingers, running one of the tiny cross arms against her lower lip as she figured out events as they happened in her head before she wrote it all down. She rolled her eyes at Jane, he'd obviously figured out she was missing her necklace.

"Couldn't find it at home." She tried not to sound too upset.

"You won't find it on the floor either." Jane said, still looking round the room, eyes scanning the shelves. If they had an honest cleaning staff, and of the ones he'd met they'd seemed a decent bunch, likeliness was they'd have put the pendant somewhere safe of a shelf for Lisbon to find.

It only took a quick scan before his eye settled on the small glint of light bouncing off a shelf.

"Ah," with two steps he reached the shelving, picked up the necklace and turned to Lisbon with a satisfied look. "Looks like the clasp is broke."

Lisbon jumped up from her seat and took the profferred necklace with a sigh of relief. Before she could thank him the phone shrilled loudly and she automatically picked it up and put it to her ear.

Another case to solve.


End file.
